EN:
Can music do anything when there’s nothing to be done?
Over the past year, the economic crisis in Venezuela has
spiraled into one of those grinding international struggles that to most
Americans feel vague and intractable. With many blaming the government’s
blunders and ideological blinders for impoverishing the country, widespread
scarcities have forced the mentally ill to
go without anti-psychotic medication; water shortages have
prompted rationing and blackouts.
This is the disquieting context into which the conductor
Gustavo Dudamel,
that troubled nation’s most famous high-culture export, and his grinning,
charming Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela arrived in New York this
week to open Carnegie Hall’s
season with three concerts, starting with a gala performance on Thursday.
The Bolívars are the latest iteration of what was once the
marquee youth orchestra of El Sistema, the publicly financed Venezuelan arts
education monolith that has been praised for helping raise thousands of
children out of poverty. For all the good El Sistema does, its closeness to the
government has made many wonder whether it and the Bolívars are inextricable
from — or even function as a kind of propaganda mission for — a regime that has
dragged its people to disaster. And concertgoers might even ask how they should
approach listening to this orchestra at this particular fraught moment.
These questions have taken on a different cast as the
Bolívars have changed from an educational endeavor to a more standard
international ensemble, no longer sloughing off its members as they age. Under
the artistic leadership of Mr. Dudamel, 35, who is also the music director of
the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the groupmakes serious recordings, goes on serious tours and
gets prestigious gigs like the Carnegie opening — a slot that has lately gone
to the New York and Berlin philharmonics and the Chicago Symphony.
Thursday’s performance did not feature a group quite fit to
stand in that exalted company: This was a feel-good, sound-good-not-great
concert. The Bolívars may no longer be a youth orchestra, but they play with
the fervent blandness of child prodigies. This was colorful music — Ravel’s “La
Valse,” Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and a closing assortment of
dance-themed bonbons, some more tightly executed than others — that here often
lacked color. (And why is the roster so overwhelmingly male?)
But the musicians were visibly having the time of their
lives. You would not know — sitting among the gown- and tuxedo-clad crowd —
that these artists’ home country is grievously suffering. In brief remarks from
the stage that focused on his and the players’ love of, and joy in, music, Mr.
Dudamel dropped an oblique reference to “the troubling times we are living in,”
and that was that.
But is that enough? It is a question that has dogged Mr.
Dudamel’s career. The smiling international face of El Sistema, he has come
under criticism for remaining a largely silent (and therefore acquiescent)
beneficiary of government support.
Mr. Dudamel has said that his main concern is the
perpetuation of El Sistema. When controversy greeted the Bolívars’ visit to
California last year, he wrote in an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles
Times that taking sides in the conflict could politicize El
Sistema, and thus threaten it.
Mr. Dudamel conducting the Simón Bolívar orchestra in Ravel’s
“La Valse” and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.”
“Do not mistake my lack of political posturing for a lack of
compassion or beliefs,” he wrote. Lately, he has been slightly more
forthcoming. He briefly mentioned Venezuela’s troubles in a speech at the White House last
month, saying that “during times of crisis, the unforgivable sin is to cut
access to art.”
For this single-minded focus, Gabriela Montero, a prominent
Venezuelan pianist, chided him on her Facebook page.
“Many Venezuelans are deeply disappointed,” she wrote, “that he isolated
musicians as preferential members of society, once again, by insisting that the
only important question to ask, in the midst of an unprecedented humanitarian
crisis, is ‘Can Venezuela save El Sistema?’”
There are no easy answers, either for Mr. Dudamel or for us,
to these kinds of ethical quandaries. And this is hardly the first time we’ve
had to check our moral compasses as classical listeners. Mr. Dudamel has
strained to remain above the partisan fray. But what are we to make of the more
overt, unapologetic political activity of the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev,
a very public booster for Vladimir V. Putin, who was advocating anti-gay laws
and squeezing any political dissent as he remains a crucial ally of Mr.
Gergiev’s Mariinsky Theater?
When Soviet artists toured America during the Cold War, were
they thawing a conflict, or were they whitewashing human-rights violations?
Even if a repressive government is far different from a powerful individual,
many have objected to the policy positions and political actions of the
industrialist David H. Koch. Should these people’s feelings about Mr. Koch
affect their enjoyment of New York City Ballet, which performs at the David H.
Koch Theater?
But there is no disentangling the performance of classical
music from a state of political affairs that many object to. If we want art —
and we should — we need to realize that purity in this regard is impossible.
So I don’t think it makes sense, for example, to boycott City
Ballet to avoid the Koch Theater. But neither should its name be ignored. If
you want to cheer the Bolívars’ signature spirited rendition of “Mambo,” from
“West Side Story,” I would say that it is your responsibility also to learn
about — and in some way keep in mind as they play — the situation facing their
countrymen.
When you go to the symphony, study the list of donors in the
playbill and Google their professional activities. If these days we insist on
knowing the farm our restaurant chicken comes from, why shouldn’t we know the
doings of the private-equity firms supporting our orchestras?
The key for contemporary listeners is to keep not just our
ears open, but also our eyes. There is no such thing as apolitical culture —
Ravel’s “La Valse,” for one thing, lurches like the nauseating World War I
hangover that it is. And there should be no such thing as apolitical culture
consumers.
“In El Sistema’s orchestras,” Mr. Dudamel wrote last year,
“the son of an opposition leader and the daughter of a government minister may
sit next to each other creating beautiful music. In that moment, they know no
politics.”
We in the audience should not grant ourselves the same
luxury.
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